‘THE LAST RESORT RESORT’ A ‘COMEDIC SLASHER’ FILM BEING SHOT THIS WEEKEND AT FAMILY COTTAGE IN MUSKOKA BY TMU STUDENTS IS ‘HILARIOUS’
Mark Clairmont | MuskokaTODAY.com
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FOOT’S BAY — What do you do when your daughter says she wants to invite a few friends up to the cottage for the weekend.
“Sure!” says mom.
And when two dozen university students show up with a machete, an axe, a small film and sound crew and a huge red sign that they tack over your front door dubbing the rustic rural Lake Joseph retreat: ‘The Last Resort Resort’ ….
Well, nothing to do but welcome them like any other summer guests — add extra towels and fill up the bunkies and living room with mattresses. And plenty of pasta.
Director Marina McAleer sprung the fun surprise on her parents, Lisa and Will, when the TMU film student’s script won the university school contest for a full production as part of a her fourth year Media Production graduating program thesis project.
The short film follows a group of delinquent teens sent to a correctional retreat, where they begin disappearing one by one in “hilarious ways,” says Ryan Till, the business manager and one of the four student partners.
“It’s kind of a comedic slasher,
so it’s really funny,” adds McAleer.
The film’s director said in an interview on set last night “I’ve grown up here every summer of my life. For four months of the year I lived up here with my grandparents. It’s amazing, I’ve been so lucky.”
But she said her grandparents aren’t up this weekend at their modest old-style Muskoka Lakes seasonal home.
“This would probably stress them out a little.”
That’s left Lisa and Will as hosts.
Will hopes to squeeze in a boat ride tomorrow if final scheduling allows.
As for the film, Marina said: “A few years ago, my friend Aldo (Pastore) and I wrote this script for something completely separate. Same script — just adjusted.
“In your fourth year they have everybody in the program pitch an idea. And a small group (three) get picked to go forward and be produced. So we got picked throughout our whole program to have ours be produced and to have it get shot. Which was really exciting. So it went through quite the selection process to get here.”
She added: “We’ve been working on it for about six months now — me, Aldo (the producer), Tamanna (Malhi technical producer) and Ryan, the four leads. And we’ve been shooting for about a week now.”
McAleer says the film is about “a group of juvenile delinquents who are sent to a correctional retreat instead of a juvenile detention centre. They’re all these kids with these bad back stories and troubled lives. And they’re sent here and are slowly killed off by one of the counsellors.
“It’s kind of a comedic slasher, so it’s really funny. Yeah, it’s been lots of fun.
“It’s gonna be about 30 minutes.”
So who produces it?
“Our producer is Aldo, the one in the blue hat. He does a lot of things, including acting in it,” says McAleer.
“We fund it all ourselves. We’ve been fundraising, we’ve put in our own money. We’ve done bake sales, sold pins, sold t shirts. It’s been a lot of hard work.”
So why not just produce it without needing to be picked?
“Technically you can,” says Pastore. “But I think it’s the fact you’re doing it for your thesis project, and it’s the culminating project of your entire four years program. So this gets a lot more attention when you say: ‘Oh, it’s for a thesis, a practicum.’ That’s bigger than saying: ‘Oh, I’m just doing a film.’”
“And you have access to a lot more equipment, more resources to recruit at school,” says McAleer. “And you get to use a lot of alum and kids who go to the school. So we have a lot of people who we didn’t know before, but who have joined our team, because they have worked in the program and they know what to do.”
Most of the shooting is outdoors. But the film is being primarily being done this week in Muskoka.
“We’re also actually are doing a lot of our indoor stuff on location here,” said Pastore.
“We’re shooting in this cabin. We’re shooting in the boathouse down at the water,” McAleer says. “And then we have some shoot days in Brampton. So we have a permit and we’re getting a section of a park reserved for us.”
What about the post editing? Is it back at TMU?
“Because you do everything yourself, you put a call out to other students, and ask if anyone is editing,” says Pastore. “It could be if someone on this crew right now wants to do the editing. But you put out a call separately and people will apply. Otherwise, you have to do it on your own. It’s our responsibility to figure out who’s gonna edit it.
“But if we can’t find an editor we do it ourselves. I’m sure we’ll be able to find several people. That’s one aspect of my job. I’ve already talked with someone who wants to do audio posts, someone who wants to do colour grading, someone who wants to do cutting.”
Pastore said the school “provides us with subscriptions to Adobe services and stuff like Premieres, audio libraries and Pro Tools.”
“But at end of the day, it comes down to skill, and I think some outsourcing somebody else would do a better product than our editing skills,” admits the director.
What about AI — the elephant in the room — can’t it do a lot of that?
“There’s definitely some AI being incorporated into the television and film life,” agrees McAleer. “But there is there’s no comparison to somebody’s real creativity and the real passion they put into creating something like this. AI couldn’t create something and have the same feeling that we have here.”
“I think even if it’s not perfect, that (personal touch) adds to the charm of it,” Pastore continues. “That’s the humanity behind it. And we’ve really prided ourselves on having no AI involved in, especially generative, like artistic AI, anything like that.
“Everything we’ve sourced like graphic design or social media coordinators, they’re all people from school who are eager to work on those kinds of roles, and it’s better to give that opportunity to someone to refine their skills and work on a project that they’re passionate about.”
Will AI affect your final thesis grade?
Pastore says that’s already been discussed in first year.
“Well, they had a conversation in the first class, where they said ‘if you’re going to use AI you have to do it in this X, Y same way.’ Like they say you can use it for idea generating and then you have to site it or whatever.
“I would rather just not use it at all. We wrote the script together. No AI. And we refined it. We’ve got like five or six revisions now.”
And CGI, sunsets, rain and their ability
to change the script on the go?
“We’ve been timing it in the day, each shot, so that we’re getting the lighting that we want and that we have enough time to shoot because we are on such a condensed schedule,” says McAleer. “A lot of crossing our fingers for good weather and no rain.”
Which they got with a perfectly-lit September weekend.
But “when you build out the schedule and you’ve got certain shots happening on one day, then you might have different shots from the same scene happening in a different location another other day, you can’t do that,” says the director. “There’s continuity errors.”
Not to speak of the sound of CP Trains suddenly driving by in nearby MacTier forcing McAleer to shout “action” then quickly “cut.”
Of course there’s also always expensive equipment and cameras to contend with — even as it’s shot using only what looks like one damn fine SLR digital camera.
And it’s entirely a Canadian production.
“Yeah, yeah, we all go to school in Toronto,” said Malhi.
What is the film’s budget?
About $7,000, Malhi says, adding “that’s on the expensive end of student films.”
However, said Pastore, “because a lot of people will stay close to Toronto or they’ll use the studios that the campus provides to us” there are some savings.
“But we wanted to do something more ambitious,” he said. “So we’re paying for everyone’s food for a while. Permits. And equipment rentals that we don’t get through the school. We could avoid that if we wanted to shoot on campus or like around the area. But it’s not the same.”
“It wouldn’t have achieved what we wanted,” stated McAleer.
“We’re very exterior heavy shoot. So the vast majority of our shoots are outside,” Pastore says. “But people who are doing a lot of indoor stuff can book out a studio and set deck it and dress it up. Make it look good.”
So when will audiences see ‘Last Resort?’
“We need to have a rough cut or either a trailer done by December,” McAleer adds.
That’s the “final submittal for this course, a rough cut or trailer. After that we can choose how long we want to work on the project, obviously,” says Pastore who notes they are shooting early in the final semester compared to others. So they have added time.
“And then next semester, we’re hoping to submit it to festivals and just get it out there more once it’s finalized,” says McAleer.
That means it could possibly be seen in about a year from now if this weekend’s filming, fall and winter post production and editing continues on schedule.
And their thesis lets project lets them graduate.
Meanwhile they’ve got that boat ride to look forward tomorrow.
The film is a business ownership partnership between McAleer, Pastore, Till and Malhi.
“The four of us all own a quarter of the project,” says McAleer.
To help them see their gofundmepage here.
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